On December 4th, the Copernicus Sentinel-1C satellite, designed and built by Thales Alenia Space, will be launched from the European Space Center, in French Guiana, using a Vega C launcher.
Sentinel-1C ©Thales Alenia Space
Intense activity at the European Space Center, in Kourou, French Guiana
Together with European Space Agency (ESA) and Arianespace teams, Thales Alenia Space engineers and technicians have recently celebrated the achievement of the functional tests related to Sentinel-1C satellite, part of Europe’s Copernicus program fully dedicated to environmental monitoring.
Sentinel-1C preparation for fit check ©Thales Alenia Space_ImaginE
Sentinel-1C: mission and industry role
Sentinel-1 mission will continue its critical task aiming at delivering key radar imagery of the Earth’s surface, for a wide range of Copernicus services and scientific applications.
Sentinel-1 will provide radar images of the Earth's surface images for a wide range of scientific services and applications as part of the Copernicus program. The mission will be able to capture images day and night, whatever the weather conditions. Its many missions include monitoring ice floes and the Arctic environment, detecting landslides, mapping forests, water resources and soils, and anticipating natural disasters. Sentinel-1C will also have a dedicated maritime surveillance mission.
Each satellite of Sentinel-1 series, including Sentinel-1C, is based on the PRIMA spacecraft platform developed by Thales Alenia Space for the Italian Space Agency (ASI) and carries a C-band synthetic aperture radar (SAR) instrument developed by Airbus Defence & Space.
As industrial prime contractor of Sentinel-1, Thales Alenia Space is in charge of the design, development, integration and testing of the satellites. The company also supplies technologies like the transmit/receive (T/R) modules and front-end electronics for the C-band synthetic aperture radar (SAR), advanced data management, transmission subsystems and the onboard computer. These T/R modules and front-end electronics form the core of the C-band SAR developed by Airbus Defence & Space.
Sentinel-1C will be joined in orbit by its twin Sentinel-1D, currently undergoing tests at Thales Alenia Space’s facility in Cannes. Sentinel-1C as Sentinel-1D will weigh about 2.2 metric tons at launch and will be placed into a 700-kilometer low Earth orbit. They will fly in formation to provide optimal coverage and a shorter revisit cycle to better serve users’ needs.
Sentinel-1C in Kourou ©2024 ESA-CNES-ARIANESPACE / S-Martin
The Sentinels: keeping a benevolent eye on our planet!
Copernicus is the most ambitious environmental monitoring program in the world, with 12 families of “Sentinel” satellites surveying Earth, its topography, seas, lakes, oceans, and polar regions. Copernicus also encompasses climatology missions and programs measuring human-induced CO2 emissions or affording new applications to foster sustainable agriculture and biodiversity. A program of this scale is a key to Europe’s ability to better anticipate the consequences of global warming so that we can safeguard our planet. The satellites are built by European prime contractors for the European Space Agency (ESA). Thales Alenia Space is a major contributor to 11 of the 12 missions in the European Union's Space Programme, managed by the European Commission.
Our company is prime contractor for the Sentinel-1 and 3 families, comprising four satellites each. The company is also in charge of the image ground segment for Sentinel-2, contributed to the imaging spectrometer for Sentinel-5P and provided the Poseidon-4 radar altimeter for the Sentinel-6 mission.
Thales Alenia Space has also been chosen for five of the six new Copernicus Expansion missions, three as prime contractor (CIMR, ROSE-L, CHIME) and two as payload supplier (CO2M, CRISTAL). These new satellites will be used to measure the atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) produced by human activity, monitor sea ice thickness and overlying snow depth, provide improved services for sustainable agriculture and biodiversity management, observe ocean behavior, and support precision agriculture and food security.